There’s this quote from Nabokov’s Lolita that haunts me. I have read Lolita twice in my life, but when I found this excerpt as epigraph earlier this year while reading for field exams, I didn’t recognize it. It haunts me because it lays out so clearly the ways in which I’ve sealed my own fate by presuming not just the narratives of the…
On Writing About Sex in the New York Times
One week ago, the New York Times published a very personal essay I wrote about my sex life (or lack thereof) in their Modern Love column. The first thing Dan, the column editor, asked me during our phone conversation a few weeks ago was whether or not I wanted this story in the world. He warned me a little bit…
Lesson Planning in a Journal of Heartbreak
One of my favorite things about teaching college freshman is knowing that they come to me from their respective high schools and hometowns, made from those things they’ve loved and connected to most in their 18 years. They’ve begun to form a canon of self, have been molded by the art and media they’ve consumed up to this moment. The…
This #13 (Five Promises)
1. Make time to read whatever I want to read. For the first three years of my PhD program (and before that in my Master’s program), I only read books not directly related to my coursework, exams, or dissertation during summer, winter, spring, and holiday breaks. But now that I’m post-coursework and (very nearly) post-exams, I am going to make…
Summer Slips Away
I haven’t gone this long without posting in years. I’ve somehow managed to have an incredibly busy past two months since I returned from Canada. Very soon after I got back to Colorado in June, I turned 27. Then I decided that I would work from a different coffee shop in Denver every day that I was able for the…
Canada, Digital Humanities Summer Institute, Sunshine
Dispatch from Seattle International Airport: This is my first time blogging on my updated website after migrating from spoonsandsatellites.blogspot.com. One of the many things I did while at DHSI was finally do a massive website update. I did a lot of non-course related things at DHSI because having class from 9am-4pm every day five days a week for two weeks…
I’m sitting on a couch in the walkout basement apartment of a cute little house on Denver Street in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I’m smiling because this street in the place where I used to live shares a name with the city where I was born, and my dream is for everything and everyone I love to collapse time…
Last week I attended my third ever &Now conference. Past conferences have been held in Boulder and San Diego [also Paris and Buffalo, but I didn’t attend those]. This year’s conference was at Cal Arts in Valencia, about 30 minutes from LA, which made me realize how perfect an art school is as an &Now conference space. The walls of…
Around two and a half years into my English PhD program this past fall, I started reading for field exams. Each PhD program runs their exams differently. For us, we have two sets of exams: Fields and Quals. For fields, we choose three areas of study for which we devise a list of 20-30 texts per field. My fields are…